Tim Bray has founded two companies (one now Canada’s largest software company), helped invent XML, served as Director of Web Technologies at Sun and Developer Advocate at Google, written over a million words on his blog, is known as @timbray and google.com/+TimBray, and over the last decade has worried heavily about REST, functional programming, the Android platform, and most recently Identity technology and policy.

The proportion of traffic going to mobile devices continues to increase inexorably. The time has come to ask: Will that increase ever stop? Are there application areas that are safe from being overrun by native mobile apps, or is the browser a dead end in 2014? And finally: Should we even care? Does the browser have any advantages that actually matter?